Spagetti-eastern – Video of the day

‘Tampopo’ Is One of the Best Food Movies of All Time. Thirty years after its release, this love letter to ramen is more relevant than ever. A quarter century before Jiro dreamt of sushi, Juzo dreamt of ramen. That would be Juzo Itami, the writer and director of Tampopo, a ramen-centric comedy originally released in 1985 and now enjoying a theatrical re-release after a painstaking restoration. The images are now sharper, the ramen more delectable. But what this really means is that those who sit at the intersection of cinephilia and ramen obsession, a population whose numbers today surely dwarves the population 30 years ago, can finally see every shimmering globule of pork fat floating in a shoyubroth on the big screen just as they — and Itami’s film — deserves. Today, there’s a ramen joint on every corner and a doc on every subject, and wafting through them all is ‘Tampopo.’ For those of us who came of age in an era of food porn and regionalist fetishism, it’s hard to imagine just how foreign the language of Tampopo was when it first came out. Ramen, which has now been a trend for so long it’s undergone enough mitosis to create ramen burgers and ramen tacos, was in 1985 not yet a thing — at least in the United States. In his review of the film, the New York Times’s Vincent Canby refers to noodles but never once to ramen. Roger Ebert worried, “American audiences would know little and care less about the search for the perfect Japanese noodle.” Today, on the other hand, even the most nativist culinary soul could likely offer a disquisition between ramen and soba, shoyu, and shio, Asahikawa and Kitakata varietals, if pressed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_KctoG0bAE